Love and Hate in Jamestown

by David A. Price

  Like all mariners of the era, Newport, Gosnold, and Ratcliffe were, of course, completely dependent on the winds to get them where they wanted to go. If the weather refused to cooperate, they had no choice but to drop their wooden anchors and wait—which they were forced to do almost as soon as they cast off. Starting January 5, about two weeks out, storms and contrary winds kept them pinned in the Channel, just off an area known as “the Downs,” on the coast of Kent. Never leaving sight of England, constantly hoping for a break in the weather, the voyagers were anchored there for a month.

  Tempers were stoked by the frustration and the close quarters, and so a fateful feud began on the Susan Constant during that time of waiting. On one side was the commoner John Smith; on the other, the powerful Edward-Maria Wingfield. Wingfield and some others of high rank had grown impatient with waiting around in bad weather and were ready to head back to the nearby comforts of home; Smith, not one to defer to his betters, argued against them. The expedition’s preacher, the Reverend Robert Hunt, successfully intervened on Smith’s side, even though Hunt was miserably seasick himself. Characteristically, in his later account of the incident, Smith rated Hunt according to his toughness: “Master Hunt, our preacher, was so weak and sick that few expected his recovery. Yet, although he were but 20 miles from his habitation (the time we were in the Downs), and notwithstanding the stormy weather . . . all this could never force from him so much as a seeming desire to leave the business.” The example of Hunt’s fortitude won the day and kept the fleet from turning around.6

  With the squabbling over for the moment, and with England finally receding into the distance by early February, the Atlantic journey could get under way. But in which direction? For the uninitiated, the answer would seem obvious: draw a straight line from the Channel to Virginia. On paper, that’s the most expeditious route. The route that Newport actually plotted, though, was wildly circuitous. Instead of heading directly for Virginia, the ships would sail south to the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa (near today’s Morocco), then southwest to the Caribbean, ending up below Virginia by well over a thousand miles. From there, they would work their way northward to their destination.

  Newport, the former Caribbean pirate, knew what he was doing. The success of the voyage hinged on getting the right winds—and as mariners had long known, the aptly named trade winds of the North Atlantic provide a steady, reliable western current from the Canaries to the Caribbean, ideal for the purposes of voyagers sailing to the New World. (Columbus himself had pioneered the trade winds route in his 1492 expedition.) The winds of the Atlantic form an enormous and convenient circle, in effect, between Europe, North Africa, and the Americas: the trade winds, the bottom part of the circle, are complemented by the westerlies, which blow from the northeastern tip of North America back to Europe.

  The Canaries route also had something else to recommend it: simplicity of navigation. In 1607, sailors had little means of figuring out where they were at sea. There was no accurate way for them to determine their longitude—that is, their east-west position. In theory, they could judge their latitude from the angle of the sun or a known star over the horizon; in practice, even latitude was hard to come by, because the instruments for measuring the positions of the sun and the stars were still rudimentary. A modern sailing dictionary facetiously defines longitude and latitude as “a series of imaginary lines on the Earth’s surface drawn at intervals parallel to the Equator (latitude) or the poles (longitude) as an aid to navigation. Since they are invisible, many mariners find them of limited usefulness.” That was all the more true in 1607.

  Measures of time and speed were only a little better. On land, clocks of the era were accurate only to within fifteen minutes per day— and no instruments of the era could keep time at sea, with a ship’s extremes of rolling motion, temperature, and humidity. Seafarers managed as well as they could using an hourglass and the overhead sun. To reckon their speed, and thus their distance, they threw overboard a “log line,” which was a board attached to a rope. As the board receded, the navigator noted the length of rope that unreeled while a thirty-second sandglass emptied. The navigator took the length by counting the evenly spaced knots in the line as they passed (hence the term “knots” as the standard measure of nautical speed). If no sandglass was within reach, the navigator spoke some pattern of words that would reliably take around thirty seconds to say, or so he hoped.

  Sailors did have a reasonably good measure of their direction, however. The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, like other ships of the period, would each have had a compass near the helmsman’s tiller. Each compass would have been placed in a square box held together with wooden pegs (because the magnetism from metal nails would throw off the results); inside the box was a circular card rotating on a pin, with a magnetic lodestone attached. Above the apparatus was a glass painted with points for north, northwest, and so on. On lengthy voyages such as this one, the navigator had to adjust periodically for the difference between true north and magnetic north. Still, that compass was virtually all the voyagers needed to follow the Canaries route to the New World. As the old-time mariner’s dictum puts it: If you want to go from Europe to the New World, just head south until your butter melts, then turn right.7

  Hence, the three ships followed the Canaries current southward for two weeks from Europe toward the Canary Islands. The bitter chill of the open air grew milder at first, and then it disappeared under the tropical sun. As the ships headed south, the men would have spent less time huddled below, and more time above decks regarding the horizon by day, the moon and stars by night, and imagining life in a new place. The men had come to the enterprise with a range of motives, and their hopes and fantasies would have run likewise. A few, like Smith, were after adventure; at the mature age of twenty-seven, Smith would have been delighted by the thought that the adventure of a lifetime was still ahead. For preacher Hunt, who was around ten years older, America meant founding a new church and saving the souls of innocent “savages.” Others, less sanguine, were wayward sons who “dailie vexed their fathers hearts at home,” one observer in London later wrote, “and were therefore thrust upon the voyage.”

  Most of the travelers, however, were on board because they—like the Virginia Company itself—expected quick treasure. Indeed, the 1606 “Ode to the Virginian Voyage,” a dozen stanzas of celebratory verse by the poet Michael Drayton, a friend of a Virginia Company investor, marked the ships’ departure with an approving recital of those expectations:

  And cheerfully at sea

  Success you still entice

  To get the pearl and gold,

  And ours to hold

  Virginia,

  Earth’s only paradise!

  Where nature hath in store

  Fowl, venison, and fish,

  And the fruitful’st soil

  Without your toil,

  Three harvests more,

  All greater than your wish.8

  Those cheerful assumptions about life on the frontier were skewered by 1605’s Eastward Ho, in which a sea captain pulls the legs of two gullible adventurers with tales of the awaiting riches. Thanks to the natives’ acquaintance with the Roanoke colonists, claims the captain, the natives are so much “in love” with the English “that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet.” When one of the men asks just how much treasure that is, the captain enlightens him:

  Gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us. . . . Why, man, all their dripping-pans and their chamber pots are pure gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and, for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore.9

  Such were the likely thoughts—only slightly exaggerated—of many of the Virginia voyagers as they made their way toward the tropics.

  When they reached the Canaries, the voyagers stopped briefly to take on fresh water. Smith was in familiar territory ther
e; while on his way home from the Turkish wars, he had spent some time as a rider on a French buccaneer’s vessel en route to Morocco, passing by the Canaries during his travels. Tempers again flared between Wingfield and Smith the day after the three ships left the islands. Tensions may well have been increased not only by Smith’s lesser social origins, but also by his geographic roots. The people of his native Lincolnshire, isolated by stretches of impassable marshland, were held by the better classes of England to be backward and uncouth, verging on barbarous. Just what transpired between the men is now unknown, but Smith, with the impatience of one who had been there and felt he knew his way around, may have overstepped his social bounds by sharing his opinions with the worthies: Don’t drop anchor on this side of the island, do it on the other side. Don’t load the casks like that, load them like this. Pull up anchor by morning, or the Spanish will spot us. Do things this way. Do everything my way.

  In any event, Smith in the end was accused of plotting an insurrection. By his account, he was charged “upon the scandalous suggestion of some of the chief, envying his repute, who feigned he intended to usurp the government, murder the council, and make himself king.” The charges were trumped up. (The Reverend Samuel Purchas, a chronicler of the English voyages of the period, wrote that “Captain Smith was suspected for a supposed mutiny, though never no such matter.”) Nonetheless, Wingfield prevailed upon Newport to have Smith placed under arrest on the Susan Constant, and so Smith remained in confinement for the duration of the history-making journey.

  There, Smith no doubt set to work on notes of his observations (and grievances!) for his future writings. “Julius Caesar wrote his owne Commentaries,” Smith later noted approvingly, “holding it no lesse honour to write, than fight.” It was Smith’s philosophy, as well, reflected in his eventual output of nine books covering Virginia, New England, and the ways of seamanship. While he would inevitably have seethed at his restraint, he would also have found it agreeable to his literary pursuits—like so many other jailhouse writers to come.10

  The voyagers spent the next month sailing westward under the power of the Atlantic trade winds, the closest thing to sailing downhill. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in 1954, offered a rhapsodic description of the experience of sailing this stretch of ocean, based on his own re-creation of the early Atlantic crossings:

  Sailing before the trades in a square-rigger is as near heaven as any seaman expects to be on the ocean. You settle down to a pleasant ritual, undisturbed by shifts of wind and changes of weather. There is the constant play of light and color on the bellying square sails (silver in moonlight, black in starlight, cloth-of-gold at sunset, white as the clouds themselves at noon), the gorgeous deep blue of the sea, flecked with white-caps, the fascination of seeing new stars arise, the silver flash when a school of flying fish springs from the bow wave, the gold and green of leaping dolphins. 11

  The ships reached the West Indies on March 23, with the sighting of the island of Martinique. The colonists, still some 1,500 miles from their destination, sailed past Martinique and landed the next day on Dominica to replenish their water and food. There, they began eighteen days of island-hopping, working their way northward by sail from one small, lush landmass to another. Colonist George Percy recalled Dominica as “a very fair island, the trees full of sweet and good smells.” It was also the site of the voyagers’ first encounter with the natives of the New World.

  The English, true to form, were contemptuous of the culture of the “savage Indians” of the island, known as the Caribs. The Caribs wore jewelry through their noses, ears, and lips—“very strange to behold,” Percy thought—but were otherwise naked. The men of the tribe spoke one language, the women another. Beyond these curiosities, the English had also gleaned an unsettling (and accurate) travelers’ advisory from Spanish accounts: namely, that the Caribs sometimes ate human flesh.

  The Caribs, for their part, were suspicious of the English because they resembled the Spanish, whom the Caribs had repeatedly battled over the course of the preceding century. Dominica had been visited by Christopher Columbus, and the Caribs had since repulsed every Spanish attempt to settle there. Their favored tactic was to raise a contingent of hundreds of warriors assembled from the Carib-controlled islands, bring them together in a fleet of dugout canoes, and then overwhelm one of the Spanish settlements with a surprise attack from the sea. The Caribs thereby preserved their freedom against the slavery of the encomienda system, succeeding through force where the more trusting Aztecs and Incas had failed. Yet the Caribs did not have entirely clean hands themselves: some time earlier, they had conquered and expelled the Arawaks, the original inhabitants, from Dominica and some of the other small Caribbean islands. Tradition had it that the Caribs had arrived by canoe from parts unknown before sending the less militaristic Arawaks on their way. (The surviving Arawaks resettled in Puerto Rico and other islands in the vicinity.)

  The Caribs finally satisfied themselves that the visitors were not Spaniards—and, presumably, that they did not intend to stick around and settle. The Caribs then came to the three ships in canoes, ready to trade food in exchange for European knives and hatchets (“which they esteem much,” Percy observed) as well as copper and beads. The colonists acquired various fruits and vegetables, and also a supply of French linen that the Caribs had liberated from a Spanish ship.12

  After spending some hours on shore, the English reboarded and headed north again, passing the island of Marie Galante, landing briefly on Guadeloupe, then anchoring at the island of Nevis on March 28 in the early afternoon. Newport assembled all the men on shore, and from there they marched a mile inland, hacking their way through the dense vegetation with hatchets and swords. They carried muskets in anticipation of a surprise attack; they knew from Spanish writings that the other side of Nevis was Carib territory. They went unmolested, however, and eventually reached a valley with a comfortable spring, where the men bathed. The long-suffering travelers took a respite on the island for six days. “We . . . spent none of our ships victuall,” remembered one, “by reason our men, some went a hunting, some a fouling, and some a fishing: where we got great store of conies [rabbits], sundry kinds of fowles, and great plentie of fish.”

  One hunting party spotted a few Caribs and beckoned them to come forward. The natives instead ran away through the woods. The hunting party tried to follow them at first, then lost them. The English finally became panicked by the thought that they were being lured into an ambush, and turned tail to run back toward their camp.

  As on Dominica, the English never faced any attack from the Caribs of Nevis. Their antagonist on Nevis was neither man nor animal, but vegetation: the manchineel, a tree common to the region. It looks innocuous enough with its leafy branches and apple-like fruit. What the Spanish explorers knew, and the English evidently did not, is that it’s best to keep one’s distance: the touch of the manchineel’s toxic sap is like acid, causing the victim’s skin to burn severely and swell. The Caribs poison-tipped their arrows with it. The fruit of the tree is also toxic; the tree’s scientific name, Hippomane mancinella, means “little apple that makes horses go mad.”

  Merely brushing against the tree is not harmful, but sap squirts out from the tree if someone chops into it—which is exactly what the Englishmen did while slicing their way through during the march inland. Some of the men, in John Smith’s words, “became so tormented with a burning swelling all over their bodies they seemed like scalded men and near mad with pain.” They found that bathing in the spring eased their distress, and they were back to normal after two or three unhappy days.

  The animosity among the voyagers flared up again at Nevis; again, few details are recorded. Smith, still under arrest, was all too typically at the center of the hostilities. A gallows was actually built on Nevis for Smith’s neck, but Smith, as he wryly recalled, “could not be persuaded to use” it. With Smith having faced down his adversaries, the mysterious matter ended; the mutual resentment didn�
��t.13

  The three ships sailed from Nevis on April 3 and anchored at one of the Virgin Islands. The men spent Easter Sunday there, once more living off the land with their catches of fish, tortoises, and wildfowl. After several days, they sailed again, passing the southern coasts of Vieques and the main island of Puerto Rico. On April 7, they called at Mona, an island lodged between the Spanish strongholds of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (the latter is today home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

  By now, the ship’s water stank so badly that the men could no longer put up with it, so a group of sailors refilled the casks from the island’s fresh water. Meanwhile, a party of soldiers and gentlemen went on a hunting expedition. The expedition seemed sporting at the start; the men killed two boars and some iguanas—“a loathsome beast like a crocodile,” a group of colonists later wrote. (The West Indies iguana, Iguana delicatissima, is five or six feet long.) But like so much else, the hunt went badly wrong. Misjudging their own ability to hold up in the tropical heat, the men tackled an arduous six-mile march through the rocky and hilly terrain. They weren’t carrying water. Many of the marchers fainted, and one of them, a gentleman named Edward Brookes, became the enterprise’s first fatality, his “fat melted within him by the great heate and drought of the countrey.” The others barely took notice; there was nothing they could do for him, and they had their own hides to worry about in any case. “We were not able to relieve him nor our selves,” Percy recalled, “so he died in that great extreamitie.”